Windows' Worst Mistakes: From Clippy To Vista

Microsoft Windows has hit more than a few bumps in its 27-year history. As Windows 8 launches, let's review some of the low points.

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The early 2011 broad strategic partnership between Finnish handset maker Nokia and Microsoft arrived with much fanfare. Research outfit Gartner went so far as to predict the co-developed phones would outsell Apple's iPhone by 2015. Fast-forward to today, as financially struggling Nokia tries to push its latest Windows Phone, the Lumia 501, as a low-priced option in emerging markets.

So they should have stayed with Symbian? Or WebOS (nee PalmOS, recently sold by HP to LG to run their Washers)? Windows CE (Windows Phone pre 8) has a smaller memory footprint and better hardware response than Linux (e.g. Android) (Toyota's unintended acceleration was Linux). (Symbian usually included JME, q.v. Android's Java presentation interface, and it looks like Java is going to be a non-starter under Oracle.) The Nokia-Microsoft partnership also includes wireless/ARM(cpu) giant Qualcomm

Moronic slide show. Reflects ignorant journalism masquerading as IT knowledge. "Clippy", Microsoft Agent implementation of Office Help was crippled by inadequately designed help documentation; never provided help for real problems. Liked by average user, hated by professionals. MS Agent was the "Siri" interface of its time, limited by technology (inadequate hardware speed). Bob was a generic implementation of Packard Bell Navigator, well liked by novice users not familiar with computer GUIs. (Packard Bell was hated by the build-it-yourself types, derided as "proprietary". Compaq, HP, IBM, NEC, and rest of top manufacturers used proprietary designs also and Intel actually built PB computers as well as mail-order-PB Gateway's computers.) Bob 2.0, unreleased, was awesome but limited to top speed systems of the time. Vista was designed for administration by Enterprise Domain Administrators, but did not allow power users to administer their own machine (unless they Group Policy). Most average users from company executives to bank tellers to mom'n'pop liked Vista, lazy power user types did not. HTML rendering issues? Do I really want to see email marketing fill up my inbox, perhaps I didn't see the problem because I deleted them without reading. MS had Pen Windows available before the Apple Newton (makes Apple a Tablet failure?) and MS has consistently supported touch based industrial computers. I had a Nokia Tabet with REAL Linux OS in 2007 (not Google's crippled Android OS) which came out before telco subsidized smartphones opened the tablet market. And messaging on Google has only grown a fraction of Facebook, Twitter, et al. Does anyone actually use Google+? Aero, Ribbons? Many of the Vista visual interface changes were adopted, for better or worse, by open source (e.g. X windows) systems. RPCs were derived from Rashid et al from their (network centric) BSD Unix experience.Remember that Microsoft does extensive Usability testing as well as incorporating "alpha" and early round and "community preview" (250,000+ users) beta testing. (note: average users not journalists are not the target audience for testing.)

Wow, I felt like I had opened a time capsule when I clicked through to slide 2 and saw the screenshot of Bob. I was 10 when this was released, and I remember disliking Bob even then, despite its child-friendly appearance.